Murray Guy

Moving. It’s a word that, used to describe artworks, risks cliché, to say nothing of dangerously separating affective responses from intellectual ones. Yet for the past three decades, Zoe Leonard has honed a practice that calls for and complicates this slippery denomination: In her first solo show in a New York gallery since 2003, she even employed the literal valence of the word. She rendered Murray Guy’s newly expanded Chelsea space a giant camera obscura, conjuring a vast, continually changing image. Emptying the room while filling it lushly to the brim, she shuttered its windows, refusing all natural and artificial light, save that which penetrated via a small circular hole fitted with a lens, so that viewers entering the space found themselves initially blindedtheir eyes needing time to adjust to the lack of lightthen slowly engulfed by a dawning, ever-shifting